Press

Sam Lowe, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, told Yahoo Finance UK it was helpful “from a political signalling point of view” that there was a will to stop a no-deal Brexit. But he said he was concerned it might not be enough. “There’s a question of how you take no-deal off the table,” he said, noting that extending the Brexit deadline in March “still requires EU consent.” “You’re still just pushing back the deadline,” he said.

"In some of the key member states, senior officials believe that if the European Council wants to give the British an extension beyond July 1, the election issue could be solved in a one-page protocol that could be ratified relatively quickly,” said Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform. “This would mean the British would not have to hold elections themselves.”

If the EU cannot agree on a common system for legal migration, it may be more realistic for the Union to support bilateral projects between individual member countries or groups and third countries, said Camino Mortera-Martinez and Beth Oppenheim of the Centre for European Reform. “Europe needs migrants, and migration is inevitable,” is how they recently put it.

As Agata Gostyńska-Jakubowska of the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank, notes, it would also stop the reallocation of the 27 British seats, screwing up other countries’ polls.